With the 1st art presentation out of the way, I think we're all in agreement that the store needs to be scrapped, and by scrapped I mean the goal of the store needs to be reworked into the game by means other than a 'stand around and buy stuff' store.

Some ideas that we came up with:

Weapons are actually drops that can be picked up by players. Whether it's an enemy that drops it when he dies, a chest in the middle of a forest, or a mystical guardian that comes down from the heavens and bestows it to you, the players will be able to swap their currently equipped weapon with another that they stumble across.

With that in mind, an idea put forth was that once you finish a level with a certain weapon, you then unlock that weapon for future use. If there is going to be a level select screen, that would be where you could view you selection and make a choice before diving into the next level.

This can also be done with magic. I don't know how many enemy spell casters we plan on having (as that requires a fair amount of extra work), but it doesn't seem absurd to me to just make enemies drop random magic spells when they die, regardless if they use them or not.